With respect to the NZE vowel change, the so-called indirect priming experiment has been applied in order to investigate the diphthong merger (Warren and Hay, 2006; Warren et al., to appear; Warren et al., 2004). This merger leads to asymmetries in perception, for the following reasons. If a NZE speaker hears beer, for instance, he ought to access both the meaning of beer and the meaning of bear, since the vowel in bear raised to [i]. However, if the same speaker hears bear (with a distinct diphthong [e]), only the meaning of bear ought to be activated. Warren and his colleagues (Warren and Hay, 2006;
Warren et al., to appear; Warren et al., 2004) investigated this case, using the indirect semantic repetition priming design with an auditory lexical decision task. In this task, subjects heard pseudo-randomised lists of words and nonwords and had to press the appropriate word/nonword button on a reaction-time measurement device. Test pairs consisted of words containing [e] and [i] words (primes), while the targets were semantic relatives of the primes (i.e. drink or animal). The notion „indirect‰ semantic priming refers to the condition in which bear is the prime and drink the target. If the lexical decision on the word drink is sped up in this condition, bear has obviously co-activated beer and therefore indirectly activated drink, which leads to the priming effect.
Warren et al. found that beer primed drink better than beer primed animal and bear primed animal better than bear primed drink. However, beer also primed animal, but bear did not prime drink.
Furthermore, the lexical decision time on [i] words was significantly longer than on [e] words. This was attributed to the fact that only the former words were homophonous while the latter were not, i.e.
the direction of the merging towards [i] was confirmed by the data.
Can the same rationale be applied to an indirect semantic priming experiment with words of which the stem vowel is affected by the NZE vowel shift? In particular, can a word like bat be successfully activated by bit or bet in NZE and would that contrast with AE? In terms of an indirect semantic priming experiment, can bet and bit prime the semantic relative of bat, i.e. club, in NZE (experiment 1)?
And likewise, can bet and bit prime the semantic relative of bat in AE (experiment 2)?
FUL makes specific predictions for these cases. The crucial assumption is that if the vowel in bat is in fact non-low (i.e. mid or not specified for height, respectively), a phonetically high vowel (such as in NZE bet) or a non-high vowel (such as in NZE bit) should be a nomismatch for bat. This is illustrated in Table 52.
With respect of place of articulation, all three primes have a stem vowel which does not mismatch with the lexical representation of <a> being underspecified for coronality. In general, FUL assumes that coronality is not represented in the mental lexicon (cf. chapter 1).
Regarding vowel height, the following predictions hold: In condition 1, bit pre-activates the semantic relative of bat via bat, which has no lexical height specification. The features from the signal
71 This orthographic transcription refers to the vowel in bat. For the reminder of this chapter, orthographic rather than phonetic transcriptions are used in order to compare the different pronunciations between NZE and AE which go back to the same (orthographic) words.
and the features in the mental lexicon do not mismatch. Thus, the lexical decision time of the target will be sped up and full priming is obtained.
Table 52: Priming predictions for an indirect priming design on NZE short front vowels.
FEATURES OF PRIMES
(SIGNAL)
FEATURES OF BAT
(LEXICON) CON
-DITION
PRIME
PLACE HEIGHT
TARGET
PLACE HEIGHT
MATCH PRIMING
(1) bit [COR] [LAB]
[]72 club [] [] no mismatch yes
(2) bet [COR] [HIGH] club [] [] no mismatch yes
(3) bat [COR] [] club [] [] no mismatch yes
In condition 2, [HIGH] from the signal does not mismatch with bat, since its root vowel has no height information in the lexicon. Therefore, priming is expected in this condition as well.
In condition 3, a nomismatch occurs, since the vowel height is neither specified in the signal nor in the lexicon. Hence, both bit (phonetically not specified for height) and bet (phonetically high) should prime the semantic relative of bat in comparison to a control condition, in which an unrelated item precedes the semantic relative of bat. In fact, both bit and bet ought to prime the semantic relative of bat to a similar degree.
An exemplar-based model, in contrast, would predict that bet, being acoustically most distant to bat in NZE, should be the least likely variants of bat. Therefore, bet ought to yield the least amount of priming. Altogether, the interaction of exemplar-representations and pre-lexical biasing should lead to gradual priming effects, in that bet primes club least and bat primes club most.
FUL predicts no significant priming differences among the three conditions. However, if the same stimuli were presented to speakers which have a lexically low <a>, a high vowel in the signal should mismatch with low <a> in the lexicon. Thus, for varieties of English with a low <a> (e.g. American English with a three-way height distinction for the short front vowels), the priming expectations in FUL would differ as summarised below (Table 53).
As for place of articulation, the assumptions are similar than for the NZE listeners, except that if labiality is extracted from the prime (condition 1), this feature is incompatible with [LOW] in the mental lexicon. This constellation is somewhat different than a feature mismatch within one domain (e.g.
height or place), but should nevertheless result in reduced or no priming.
72 Note that it would be theoretically possible to invoke the extraction of the feature [MID] once the F1 frequency is within a certain range. However, this feature would never be contrastive in the phonology and furthermore would not alter the mismatching relations since it would be compatible with both [HIGH] and [LOW].
- 191 - The incompatibility emerges from the trend that American English does not have rounded (labial) low vowels (Labov, 2005; Wells, 1982b), i.e. American English vowels are either low or labial, but not both labial and low. Yet even if there were low labial vowels, they would be back (i.e. dorsal, []).
Hence, one could claim that the combination [LAB][COR] is inherently incompatible with [LOW] and therefore counts as a mismatch73. Altogether, then, bit is predicted not to co-activate bat and therefore, the semantically related target to bat will not show a lexical decision time advantage, i.e. there is no priming.
Table 53: Priming predictions for an indirect semantic priming study with a low [æ].
FEATURES OF PRIMES
(SIGNAL)
FEATURES OF BAT
(LEXICON) CON
-DITION
PRIME
PLACE HEIGHT
TARGET
PLACE HEIGHT
MATCH PRIMING
(1) bit [COR]
[LAB]
[ ] club [] [LOW] mismatch no
(2) bet [COR] [HIGH] club [] [LOW] mismatch no
(3) bat [COR] [ ] club [] [LOW] no mismatch yes
In condition 2, there is a mismatch in the height dimension. The feature [HIGH] from the (NZE pronounced) prime bet contrasts with [LOW] in the lexical specification of the vowel in bat. No priming is expected in this condition.
Lastly, condition 3 should behave parallel to condition 3 for NZE listeners. If no height information is extracted from the prime vowel, there is no mismatch with respect to the lexical vowel specification. Hence, full priming is expected.
The predictions of an exemplar-based model would be similar as before. If distances in vowel realisations would affect the priming pattern, then the furthest vowel (i.e. [] in bet) should lead to the least amount priming. in this case. On the other hand, if priming would be based on the probability that either bit or bet would be a possible realisation of bat, it should display the same gradualism;
namely, bet should be the worst prime.
Note that if NZE and AE speakers would have the same short front vowel phonemes, NZE and American English listeners ought to show the same priming patterns. If <a> is low in both NZE and American English, bet and bit should not prime club, independent of the subjectÊs dialect. If, on the
73 Note that it might also be possible that AE listeners still extract [HIGH] from the coronal rounded vowel [] in which case there would be a mismatch in the height dimension with regard to the coronal unrounded low vowel [æ] in bat.
other hand, <a> is non-low in NZE and American English, bet and bit should prime club in both subject groups.
The predictions of FUL contrast with the latter view as well as with the expectations of exemplar-based models. They are summarised below and tested in an indirect semantic priming experiment with NZE listeners (experiment 1) and with AE listeners (experiment 2):
- The lexical representation of <a> is feature-based and highly abstract. Primes with a nomismatch relation of their vowel to <a> similarly facilitate the recognition of the semantic relatives of <a>-words.
- The lexical representation of <a> differs between NZE and AE which leads to differential priming patterns between the two subject groups.